We’re excited to announce the winners of the 2016 AdMob Student App Challenge, an app building competition for students. Over 100 student teams from around the world took on the challenge to build a great app and monetize it using AdMob, with a chance to win awesome prizes.

After reviewing our 4 regional finalists, our judges have selected the global winner who will receive will receive a trip to San Francisco, including a visit to the Googleplex. Chris Akhavnr, a judge for the Challenge and President of Publishing, Glu Mobile, enjoyed reviewing the apps, noting that “After reading the business reports, I was impressed by the amount of thought each team put into their app. I'm sure these finalists will go on to have a big impact in the mobile ecosystem."

Turbo Rocket Games is a team of four: Vladimir, Yaroslava, Illya, and Serhii from Kiev, Ukraine. Vladimir and Serhii are studying informatics at National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Yaroslava and Illya are studying computer science at Brock University. To build the app effectively, the team divided the work so everyone could focus on the aspect they were best at. As the project lead, Vladimir focused on managing the development process while Yaroslava took charge of game design. As programmers, Illya and Serhii worked in tandem to write the code for the game.

About the app

Dragon Sim Online is a game where you can become a dragon and play online with friends or by yourself. The app provides a true simulation experience by challenging players to maintain their dragons’ health and energy, raise a family of dragons, fight dangerous enemies and explore the massive 3D world. The app has been downloaded over 500K times worldwide with an average review of 4.5 stars.

Congratulations to Turbo Rocket Games and thanks again to every single student who participated!

Since January, students from around the world have been submitting entries for the AdMob Student App Challenge. Students around the world were challenged to build an app that that demonstrates their skills and monetize it with AdMob. Today, we are excited to announce the four regional finalists, hand picked based on app quality and traffic.

The regional finalists are made up of the top entry in each of our 4 participating regions - North America, Europe/Middle East/Africa, Asia/Pacific and Latin America. Their apps have made a huge splash in the Google Play Store, with over 500,000 downloads and 10,000 reviews combined! Each member of the regional finalist teams will receive brand new Pixel C tablets and advance into the final round where the global winner will receive a seven night trip to San Francisco and a visit to Googleplex.

Block Havoc is North America’s finalist, and deservingly so! The app is an extremely entertaining game with endless modes and patterns that challenges users to improve their reaction time on a beautiful and polished interface.

And, LATAM’s finalist is #booleaning, a handy and well-featured calculator for boolean functions. This productivity application looks professional and is designed to save users’ time with built in logic operators, like NOT, AND, OR.

Encode: Learn to Code is APAC’s finalist, differentiating themselves with an extremely straightforward and fun way to teach beginners how to code. The simple and intuitive tutorials and lessons allowed users to immerse themselves to build a quick and strong foundation.

Our last finalist is Dragon Sim Online, an addictive game with outstanding graphics. The application provides an epic adventure that allows you to engage and join other online players through beautiful flying and fighting animation to level up in this fantasy world.

Congratulations to the Regional Finalists, and thank you again to everyone who participated. The Global Winner will be announced on August 25, 2016, so stay tuned!